Refoundation! The word is deep. The pandemic will have been the last straw, but what must be kept in mind, in view of the desired changes, is the river that has been putting pressure on our health institutions for a long time. However, this river can only grow because, in this area, the needs are unlimited, while the current crisis forces us to take note of what we have always known: the means are limited.
This crisis has also reinforced an already very strong trend of medicalization, which corresponds to what people are asking for and what governments and influential doctors are encouraging them to demand: more vaccines as a reminder even when the president of Pfizer himself recommends yearly vaccinations instead. This is how. Under these conditions, can the refoundation be anything other than another stage in rationalization… supplemented by self-medicalization, of which the self-tests are a fine example? One more step towards the obsession with health, while “health is forgetting about health”.
Let us recall the words of Nietzsche: “The degenerate man is the one who does not know how to distinguish what harms him. It follows that instead of drinking when he is thirsty, he follows the instruction of eight glasses of water a day, which does not prevent him from indulging in all kinds of excesses not indicated for him, by relying in advance on medicine to mitigate the consequences.
How do we cultivate the ability to distinguish what hurts us? It is an answer to this question sought by those who base medicine on the healing power of nature and on the first principle of Hippocrates: first do no harm. What should be the role of autonomy and heteronomy, of Hygea and Panacea? This is the question prior to any refoundation.
Which raises other deep questions. The pressure currently exerted on caregivers and the ensuing load shedding is an immediate, sensational problem, which leaves no one indifferent. Hence the fact that it is used to justify the various sanitary measures. Some of these measures, those affecting children in particular, could, however, have more serious long-term consequences for people’s well-being than those of the pandemic. Will we have the courage and the lucidity to bring these abstract and distant data into the debate on refoundation? Ten thousand premature deaths avoided over time by friendship, good nutrition and outdoor sports weigh less in the medical and political balance than a single spectacular and immediate cure. Our government, so well launched into overmedicalization by the pandemic, should not only backtrack, but change course if it really wants to overhaul the health care system.
It will also be in his interest to form an alliance with philosophies, spiritualities and religions, and to dare to reflect, with the population, on a common conception of health, without which the necessary reconciliation with death will be impossible and health, having become long-lasting and security, will move further away from life, this paradoxical mixture of self-preservation and perilous risks. Julius Caesar, alive if ever there was one, was afraid of storms to the point of lying under his cot to protect himself against lightning, but the same man exposed himself twenty times rather than one to almost death. certain. Shakespeare recognized himself in him: Cowards die many times before their death. Life, we have scientific proof, is also freedom. Has a squirrel squatted in your house? Lure him with peanuts into a cage, see him smash his teeth against the steel wires, and watch him bolt when you open the cage in the nearby forest.